Forge

[amaril]

This is a cool poem. I like how dense the language is, but sometimes the clusters of adjectives fail to advance the poem (or even the image). In particular, the line "billowed and bloomed like a jellyfish, transparent and torpid. Her coiled body a fallow tract, a whorl to nowhere" sounds cool but doesn't add much to "a candelabra of cutlasses, a human vane in the night-wind." Basically, I feel like this poem's meaning can be reduced and that the metaphors don't contribute anything other than stylistic flair: her brother is a sword swallower who bends the blades he puts in his throat. she does not have this ability, so no matter how elegant her sword-swallowing is, it is less commercially viable.

If this ^ is what the poem 'means,' that meaning is established by the first line/stanza and does not change throughout the poem, no matter how intently you describe the way she performs her sword-swallowing. You have a lot of cool lines and sounds and associations, but they fail imo to build to anything or subvert the reader's expectations.